https://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=www:documentation:featur... seems pretty appealing to me.

Read more about it here: https://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=releases:3.2.0:developer...

> In Minix as a microkernel, device drivers are separate programs which send and receive message to communicate with the other operating system components. Device drivers, like any other program, may contain bugs and could crash at any point in time. The Reincarnation server will attempt to restart device drivers when it notices they are abruptly killed by the kernel due to a crash, or in our case when they exit(2) unexpectedly. You can see the Reincarnation Server in the process list as rs, if you use the ps(1) command. The Reincarnation Server sends keep-a-live messages to each running device driver on the system periodically, to ensure they are still responsible and not i.e. stuck in an infinite loop.

The point is that when failures do occur, they can be isolated and recovered from without compromising system stability. In a monolithic kernel, a faulty driver can crash the entire system; in a microkernel design, it can be restarted independently, preserving uptime and isolating the fault domain.

Hardware glitches, transient race conditions, and unforeseen edge cases are unavoidable at scale. A microkernel architecture treats these as recoverable events rather than fatal ones.

This is conceptually similar to how the BEAM VM handles supervision in Erlang and Elixir; processes are cheap and disposable, and supervisors ensure that the system as a whole remains consistent even when individual components fail. The same reasoning applies in OS design: minimizing the blast radius of a failure is often more valuable than trying to prevent every possible fault.

In practice, the "driver resurrection" model makes sense in environments where high availability and fault isolation are critical, such as embedded systems, aerospace, and critical infrastructure. It's the same philosophy that systems like seL4 and QNX goes by.

Do you understand now?